Wednesday, April 15, 2020

COVID-19, VIRUS OR SYSTEM "BUG"?

Since its appearance in November 2019 in China, the Covid-19 has successfully undermined all authoritarian narratives of governance, from the extreme Chinese fascist dictatorship to our ultra-liberal semi-democracies. It took a microscopic grain of sand, a particle of natural chaos to literally seize all of our systems.
With the Covid-19, all the illusions, the false decorations, the hollow slogans fell by themselves, revealing the sad reality of the stupidity and the inhumanity of the politico-financial models which pretend to direct us. The Covid-19 is, on the one hand, the revelation in broad daylight of the face, as brutal as it is ineffective, of proven dictatorships (China, Iran, soon Russia and others) and their system of social control, and on the other, the outright annihilation of the false smiles and Self-Help slogans from the political sales reps in the EU, England and the USA.

It is certainly not the first time that an epidemic has hit the world, but what is different is that today, it is us that it strikes and that the bankruptcy of an effective response by many country comes from a perfectly identifiable cause: the disinvestment of governments in essential structures such as health, education or basic administration in favor of private capitalization without control and without moral responsibility (nor financial, since when that goes bad, it's up to the State, therefore us, to pay up for their mistakes ...). However, like Hitler in his bunker in 1945, our states continue their maddening denial of responsibility in the middle of a field of ruins. But today even the media behind them can no longer divert attention and find other causes for our problems. The proof: they never actually talk about the causes. They cannot. If they talked once about the reduction of beds in the hospitals, the slashing of useful jobs in administration, the policy of criminal savings in all the infrastructure of the nation, they would open the Pandora's box, whose monsters would risk taking them too.

But this total failure of our leaders is also the failure of a whole part of the education of our elites: that of business schools. The whole construction around Maastricht and Lisbon was built around a weak, harmful and totalizing ideology. What this crisis proves is that a country is anything but a business. That what constitutes the rationality of a decision is not the analysis of the results of an algorithm, but a human reflection from the real. The Covid-19 is more than a virus, it is a huge computer “bug”, which reveals all the flaws of a system which was seen until now (and which is still seen, no doubt) as the worthy and unique representative of “the end of History”, to use Francis Fukuyama’s moronic formula.

Propaganda will certainly take on the task of repainting the world in a few months' time, and will certainly claim an usurped victory from those who actually fought to save lives, despite the system. But I think, without being a prophet, that the bug will remain and that it has infected the machine much deeper than she imagines.

Because, with its tens of thousands of deaths and its ineffective and even criminal policies (To think that a natural “mass immunization” could work, when we see in history how many deaths were caused by smallpox only before the discovery of his vaccine is unfathomably stupid and sinister), our system is more than bare: it has become transparent. All the fears that one might have about his ideology are now not only confirmed, but undeniable. Even China has not been able to hide the real volume of the funeral urns, which means we have to multiply all their figures at least by 10. The society of surveillance of citizens is being transformed into a society of surveillance of the State, and ironically, thanks to purely commercial tools (social networks, among others). Oh the sweet irony it is when you think that “money has no political color”...

The Covid-19, a bug that has succeeded in a global “system error”, is therefore an essential element for a regenerated thinking of our political, social and environmental system. If it is nothing in itself but than a dirty disease that has killed far too many of us, it is nonetheless the paradoxical ally of all current social thought, whether deeply reformist or revolutionary. The machine also coughs, has a fever and is on a ventilator. But there is no hesitation here about whether to disconnect it or not. Its disappearance will no doubt save millions of lives.